Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a stream of AI that assists machines or, to say, computers to comprehend, interpret, understand human language. It includes disciplines like computer science and computational linguistics. The whole idea is to bridge the communication gap between humans and machines.

This idea has immense potential as it brings together people from various linguistic backgrounds on one platform. People from various regions can conveniently use various digital mediums and express themselves in their own language. 

India being home to around 23 regional languages, NLP is pretty relevant for us in our efforts around the digital India movement. In the past few years, the RnD around NLP has gained significant momentum. The results and application areas are evident with the popularity and usage of Siri, Google Assistant, Alexa, Cortana, and many more automatic speech recognition and understanding systems (ASR).

Natural Language Processing can further be classified into Natural Language Generation and Natural Language Understanding. 

Here are some of the usage areas which can benefit greatly from NLP: 

• Question and Answering - This is one of the best applications of NLP. It can be avidly used in scenarios where we can instantly (Fraction of a second) answer customer questions or in any scenario where there is immediate assistance required. Human and machine interaction systems can be made highly accurate with intense usage of AI and NLP.
• Automation Speech Recognition - Speech recognition is a challenging task owing to the variations in language, style, tonality, and modulation of each human. ASR systems take speech commands and operate in smart home systems, car systems, smart home systems, and many more. 
• Chatbot - Chatbots are a highly popular application of NLP used in banking, e-learning, telephone supports 24*7, etc. These are machines that talk to humans like humans without giving the other party an impression of talking to a computer program. IRCTC's AI-powered chatbot AskDISHA is a multilingual omnichannel service that reduces wait time for queries, improves customer satisfaction by 70%.
• Education - Education as a sector can utilize NLP to a great extent. This can make the whole available knowledge base in the world more accessible to the rest of the world irrespective of language or regional barriers. 
• Text Auto-Correction - Various applications for text correction are gaining momentum to correct the grammar, spellings, and punctuation using NLP. These applications use text history and typing analysis to keep adapting and present more accurate results by recognizing the problem areas. This reduces the effort of the writer and increases efficiency. 
• Emotion/Sentiment Analysis - Sentimental analysis is critical to any business to understand how people view or react to their marketing plan, communication, efforts, or strategies. This monitors people's sentiments on various platforms and can be used to align the efforts accordingly. NLP is used to access and understand the reviews, and decisions are made in terms of whether the viewers or customers are satisfied or unsatisfied. This also extends to feedback analysis, helping governments and other public bodies to streamline their efforts in the desired direction.
• Healthcare - Healthcare is another sector where NLP can be extensively used. Clinical documentation, patient support, online patient support systems, research, and the study of drugs' effects are some of the healthcare areas where NLP cancan as a game-changer. 
• Forensics - Many government agencies are using NLP to improve the investigations and processing around law enforcement, defense, and intelligence. In such scenarios, anomaly detection and establishment of relationship within various documents gets much easier. 
• Machine Translation - In this application of NLP, translations are done from one language text to another while keeping the statements' core meaning unchanged. This helps people with various backgrounds and different languages communicate better.

The growth of NLP has made various businesses realize that to stay ahead of the curve and grow, they must harness AI's capabilities. The diverse set of advantages NLP has to offer makes it inevitable for businesses.